England in the Ninth Century: the Crucible of Defeat

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Abstract
Historians, particularly medieval historians, are vulnerable to the charge that they concentrate their attention upon success—on the successful dynasties, institutions and ideas—and that they thereby misrepresent the past. Thus the political historian sees the ninth century as the crucial period in the evolution of a unitary English kingdom. The four powerful and independent Anglo-Saxon kingdoms existing in 800—Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex—had been reduced by the end of the century to one, Wessex. But this was achieved not through the assertion of West Saxon supremacy—the overlordship that Egbert won in 829 lastedbut a year—but by the destruction of the other kingdoms by Viking conquest and their partial replacement by new Viking states. Though it is clear to us with hindsight that Alfred's claim to be the ruler of all the English not under Danish rule was the germ of the unification of England under his descendants, no one can have known, when Alfred died in 899, that new Viking armies were not being raised in the Scandinavian homelands to crush the remaining English kingdom. At that time, for most Englishmen, the deepest impression must have been of the defeat and destruction of the English polity and culture.

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